Retrocomputing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for vintage-computer hobbyists interested in restoring, preserving, and using the classic computer and gaming systems of yesteryear. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm attempting to retrieve text documents from a floppy disk that is a 2.0 MB DS HD floppy similar to:
The only thing he knows is that the documents were created on a Mac around 1996.
What are some ways that I can retrieve these text documents and what software problems should I expect keeping I have no idea what application or OS was used to create the documents?
From my experience, you have two options:
If you are concerned about using this old disk in a newer PC and running into a formatting error so severe it may damage your media the choose option
It may be a good idea to acquire one of these legacy Power Macs anyway, since you may run into this issue in the future - diskettes, in the wild, tend to roam in packs. You maybe able to find a functional one inexpensively.
Also, the files on the disk may be in some odd Macintosh application format, like Claris, Appleworks, Office Macintosh, or some other non-cross platform extension that may require you to manipulate it and convert it to a PC-readable file type from the original data. I doubt that time is of the essence, since this floppy has probably spent many seasons in retirement already.
That's the ubiquitous 1.44MB 3.5" floppy. Any modern floppy drive should be able to read it; the hard part is finding software that understands the format -- Mac-formatted disks aren't readable by Windows.
The first thing I'd try is plugging a USB floppy drive into a Mac and reading the disk directly: if you're lucky, everything should just work, and you can copy the files onto the hard drive to try various options for reading them. If it doesn't, you're probably looking at a data-recovery effort, which can get a bit tricky.
The files may be plain text or SimpleText documents, in which case TextEdit can read them. If not, LibreOffice is free and supports a wide range of old Mac word-processor formats.
On floppy media that was not sold as preformatted, the unformatted capacity was commonly stated. ~2 MB is the unformatted capacity of what is commonly called a ‘1.44 MB’ floppy.
However, the actual low-level format on the floppy could be:
The filesystem could be:
The Documents:
Unless they are plaintext (and even then, you might need a text editor that is configurable regarding character and newline encoding), you will need whatever software can process the given format.
In case of a documented, or semi-plaintext, format, you might be able to write a rudimentary decoder yourself.
If the filesystem is Macintosh specific, it is important to know that these filesystems actually treat files as a pair of two "subfiles", so called forks. Macintosh applications often made use of that, and a file is incomplete and probably unusable if one of these forks is lost. Special attention has to be paid when handling this kind of file, since some non-Mac drivers will either only give you one of these forks or present them as two separate files (sometimes with one of them as a hidden file).
